The Importance of Evidence-Based Disaster Planning

Complexities, Catastrophes and Cities: Emergency Dynamics in Varying Scenarios and Urban Topologies

“…In disaster management, it has been established that "Planning should take into consideration how people and organizations are likely to act, rather than expecting them to change their behavior to conform to the plan" [3]. ABM serves as a means of describing the behavior of medical facilities (controllable) and evaluating their performance in different disease scenarios for people with different personality and health profiles.…”

“…Disaster planning is often based on assumptions derived from a conventional wisdom that is at variance with empirical field disaster research studies [3]. Our efforts to avert this error have resulted in a new system, called PLAN C (Planning with Large Agent-Networks against Catastrophes) [6,7,9,12,8], with well-identified, validated, simple rules with minimal number of parameters to avoid modeler bias and unnecessary complexity.…”

Selection Criteria of Hospital Volunteers for the Provision of Health Services in Disasters

“…It is impossible to predict how people respond in disasters; however, anticipating risks and preparing people to deal with these risks can improve people's responses [2,3]. During disasters, because of the vast extent of the injuries, hospitals and health centers staff cannot usually respond to all required tasks [4].…”

Adaptive workflow simulation of emergency response

“…Although these reconstructions are able to provide lessons learned on a general level, unfortunately the data used can be prone to recall biases, caused, for example, by persons' or stakeholders' interests. This can, consequently, lead to the release of incomplete, methodologically non transparent or incorrect data (Auf der Heide, 2006). When fully basing system development on reconstruction data, it can lead to systematic errors, jeopardising the validity of the system.…”

“…The research methods' objective is twofold; first they are used to gather the necessary data for the development of the AWS in order to ground its development in emergency response practice. Grounding the development of the AWS simulation is quintessential to minimize the gap between reality and the simulation, will lead to a better founded simulation and increases the soundness of the results (Brenner & Werker, 2007; Auf der Heide, 2006;Turoff, Chummer, Van de Walle, & Yoa, 2004). Grounding here refers to the degree in which the assumptions and relations in a simulation are based on empirical findings instead of being hypothetical.…”